armed forces day

The rainstorm of almost tropical ferocity which swept across West Suffolk yesterday afternoon (28 June) was dying down as we assembled for a silent Peace Vigil to mark Armed Forces Day. But the distant thundery grumbles seemed – at the risk of being mocked for the use of Pathetic Fallacy – to be a reminder of the persistence and ubiquity of strife.

A new report from Quaker Peace & Social Witness describes Armed Forces Day as one strand in a government strategy to reverse falling recruitment and declining public support for military interventions.

“Gross impiety it is that a nation's pride should be maintained in the face of its poor.” William Penn wrote these words in 1669. We have no means of knowing what his voice might have sounded like when he read them aloud, as he undoubtedly would have done, but when I hear them in my mind's ear, they are spoken with firmness and a touch of anger. They are words we do well to heed in our own time.

Edinburgh will be awash with military symbolism and celebration today (25 June 2011), as the city hosts the national event for Armed Forces Day - which David Cameron last year said should be “an explosion of red white and blue all over the country.” That thought may cause SNP First Minister Alex Salmond at least a moment's hiccup as he stands next to the PM on the podium!